A 12-year-old boy adopted in his native Russia and abandoned in the Dominican Republic by suspected drug traffickers has been in limbo for years, officials said on Tuesday.
The boy, Diego, says he wants to return to Russia but he has almost completely forgotten his native language. He has had no formal education since the Russian couple left him with a taxi driver in 2005.
Because of his status as a foreigner, the boy has not been eligible for adoption, said Aly Pena, legal director of the Dominican National Youth Council.
“It is a very complicated situation,” Pena said.
The case was not widely known until Russia’s children’s rights ombudsman, Pavel Astakhov, mentioned the boy last week in response to a question at a Moscow news conference on overseas adoptions.
Russia froze adoptions by US citizens last week after another adopted boy was sent back to Russia by his US family.
Diego, originally from the Volgograd region, was adopted in 2003 by a Russian couple who left him two years later in the Boca Chica tourist zone of the Dominican Republic with a driver who worked for them during their stay in the Caribbean country, authorities said.
After returning to Russia, the couple were arrested for cocaine trafficking.
The boy lived with the taxi driver and his wife until authorities received allegations they were mistreating him. In 2008, he was taken away and sent to a temporary shelter for children who have been victims of domestic violence.
Diego’s case is “unique because he has seen many children pass through [the shelter], but his situation remains the same,” said Juan Ramon Sanchez, who directs the shelter in Boca Chica.
The Russian embassy in Venezuela has sent officials to meet with the boy, but they have not offered any alternatives to his current situation.
Ivan Savin, the consul general at the embassy, said that Russian authorities are preparing for his repatriation, but that Dominican officials may determine the child would be better off staying in the country.
“He has problems with the Russian language,” Savin said, adding that by now the boy is used to living in the tropics.
While he waits, Diego will at least begin receiving an education. Through the intervention of a humanitarian group he secured a place in a private school beginning this week, Sanchez said.
In the sweltering streets of Jakarta, buskers carry towering, hollow puppets and pass around a bucket for donations. Now, they fear becoming outlaws. City authorities said they would crack down on use of the sacred ondel-ondel puppets, which can stand as tall as a truck, and they are drafting legislation to remove what they view as a street nuisance. Performances featuring the puppets — originally used by Jakarta’s Betawi people to ward off evil spirits — would be allowed only at set events. The ban could leave many ondel-ondel buskers in Jakarta jobless. “I am confused and anxious. I fear getting raided or even
POLITICAL PATRIARCHS: Recent clashes between Thailand and Cambodia are driven by an escalating feud between rival political families, analysts say The dispute over Thailand and Cambodia’s contested border, which dates back more than a century to disagreements over colonial-era maps, has broken into conflict before. However, the most recent clashes, which erupted on Thursday, have been fueled by another factor: a bitter feud between two powerful political patriarchs. Cambodian Senate President and former prime minister Hun Sen, 72, and former Thai prime minister Thaksin Shinawatra, 76, were once such close friends that they reportedly called one another brothers. Hun Sen has, over the years, supported Thaksin’s family during their long-running power struggle with Thailand’s military. Thaksin and his sister Yingluck stayed
Kemal Ozdemir looked up at the bare peaks of Mount Cilo in Turkey’s Kurdish majority southeast. “There were glaciers 10 years ago,” he recalled under a cloudless sky. A mountain guide for 15 years, Ozdemir then turned toward the torrent carrying dozens of blocks of ice below a slope covered with grass and rocks — a sign of glacier loss being exacerbated by global warming. “You can see that there are quite a few pieces of glacier in the water right now ... the reason why the waterfalls flow lushly actually shows us how fast the ice is melting,” he said.
Residents across Japan’s Pacific coast yesterday rushed to higher ground as tsunami warnings following a massive earthquake off Russia’s far east resurfaced painful memories and lessons from the devastating 2011 earthquake and nuclear disaster. Television banners flashed “TSUNAMI! EVACUATE!” and similar warnings as most broadcasters cut regular programming to issue warnings and evacuation orders, as tsunami waves approached Japan’s shores. “Do not be glued to the screen. Evacuate now,” a news presenter at public broadcaster NHK shouted. The warnings resurfaced memories of the March 11, 2011, earthquake, when more than 15,000 people died after a magnitude 9 tremor triggered a massive tsunami that
RSS